Cheryl Strayed's Wild reading list

Telegraph Film19 February 2015 • 11:20am

Rosy Cherrington counts down the books that Wild author Cheryl Strayed read during her adventure into the American wilderness

Cheryl Strayed is the woman who walked her way back to happiness: her 1,100-mile trek along the Pacific Crest Trail led her away from a grief-marked life of drug abuse and promiscuity. Years later, she turned her story into a bestselling memoir, Wild, which is now a film starring Reese Witherspoon.

In addition to her "bible" - The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume I: California - in Wild Strayed makes frequent reference to the many books she carried with her. This was her reading list.

1. The Dream of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich

A favourite book of Strayed's, and one she describes as her "religion". The award-winning feminist writer's collection of transcendent poems proved cathartic for Strayed, who wrote in Wild that "certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend”.

2. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Written between midnight and 4am over the course of six weeks, Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece follows the Bundren family as they journey across Mississippi countryside to bury their wife and mother.

3. A Summer Bird-Cage, Margaret Drabble

Sparkling and witty, Drabble's debut novel recounts the lives of two sisters with very different trajectories. Oxford graduate Sophie feels left behind while the sophisticated Louise is thrown into a life of high-octane glamour, but things are not always as they seem. Strayed admitted that she tossed the novel in her bag as it "looked interesting".

4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

“We all have books on our shelves that we’ve not yet read. I’d never read Lolita. So I thought I’ve got to read Lolita,” said Strayed. Humbert Humbert lusts after the 12-year-old Lolita in one of the most controversial pieces of 20th-century literature.

5. Dubliners, James Joyce

One of Joyce's most accessible works, this is a collection of 15 short stories written in a naturalistic form that perfectly encapsulates middle-class life in early 1900s Ireland.

6. The Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor

Picked up along her travels, Strayed found comfort in the works of O'Connor, quoting her in Wild: “Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world after he had got a new pair of shoes.” O’Connor won the 1972 US National Book Award for Fiction for her Complete Stories, and is a figurehead of southern American literature.

7. The Novel, James A Michener

The favourite author of Strayed's late mother, Michener departed from his signature historical fiction in this story, which describes the unique process of developing a novel. Strayed has admitted that she felt too "sophisticated" to enjoy her mother's taste in books, considering herself a devotee of "serious" literature, but later wrote: "In my first month of college, I quickly learned that I knew nothing about who was important and who was not."

8. Waiting for the Barbarians, JM Coetzee

A fitting read for Strayed's venture into the wilderness, this allegorical tale of oppression, rebellion and war is set in barren obscurity "on the edge of the Empire". Delving into the psychology of human loneliness, the Nobel Prize-winning author’s razor- sharp writing questions the concept of personal identity in a totalitarian system.

9. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

"These were books we’d read before, books we’d loved,” Strayed writes of The Awakening, as she recounts reading to her mother in hospital as she neared the end of her battle with lung cancer. Published in 1899, Chopin's novel foreshadowed the American modernist movement, exploring a young woman's search for her true self and sexuality in the face of societal traditions.

10. The Ten Thousand Things, Maria Dermoût

In Wild, Strayed writes: "Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” The Dutch author's loosely autobiographical novel is set on the Spice Islands of Indonesia.